How Much Information Is There in the World?
Looking at both digital memory and analog devices, the researchers calculate that humankind is able to store at least 295 exabytes of information. (Yes, that’s a number with 20 zeroes in it.)
Put another way, if a single star is a bit of information, that’s a galaxy of information for every person in the world. That’s 315 times the number of grains of sand in the world. But it’s still less than one percent of the information that is stored in all the DNA molecules of a human being.
Hat-tip: Joe Carter
February 12th, 2011 at 12:38 pm
I met a chap at an Oxford college where I’d been invited to preach a few years ago whose field was information retrieval. If I remember correctly, he told me that that year the amount of digital information created had doubled all the information in the world previously created.
Even if I got that a bit wrong, the above article is a fascinating reminder of how much is ‘out there’. Fortunately most of it is on the internet, which means 99.999% of it is garbage.
February 12th, 2011 at 3:06 pm
Whoa. I’ve got to try to figure out how to use that in school.
February 12th, 2011 at 3:17 pm
Erm, I’d also query the DNA figure. There’s only 3 billion base pairs, and I don’t think you need expend that many bits to represent it. How you manage to get 3*(10^20) from 3*(10^9) is beyond me. Probably running it in Vista or something. The info in all human genomes, then we might be getting closer.
But yes, I’m trying hard not to despair over how much of that info is cracked DVDs and lolcats.
“Releasing videos on YouTube is kind of like throwing messages in bottles out into a churning sea made up ENTIRELY of messages in bottles.” – Yahtzee